BESMIRCHING ARMENIANS

[Yervant1]

BESMIRCHING ARMENIANS

 

Golidas Institute, London

March 21 2013

 

LSE, London. 15 Mar. 2013. The Federation of Turkish Associations UK,

an umbrella organization for 16 UK-based Turkish groups, organised a

conference on "Turkish Armenian Relations". The meeting comprised of

a chairperson and three guest speakers followed by a short Q&A session.

 

The chairperson of the panel was Andrew Mango, a longstanding supporter

of official Turkey, who opened the meeting with a paper titled "Zurich

Protocol and Other Endeavours to Normalize Relations Between Turkey

and Armenia." His presentation repeated the views of the Turkish

Foreign Ministry in blaming Armenia for the breakdown of the Zurich

protocols and left out such details as the Turkish Prime Minister's

declaration of new conditions to the protocols after they had been

signed or the Turkish Parliament's refusal to ratify the agreement.

 

The first guest speaker was Tadeusz Swietochowski, a veteran historian

of the South Caucasus, who spoke about "Ethnic Conflict and Political

Awakening in Azerbaijan in the 1905-1907 Revolution." His focus

was the polarization of Armenian and Tatar [modern day Azerbaijani]

communities within the context of imperial Russian policies before

World War I. His presentation was generally balanced and interesting.

 

He did not, however, touch on current realities in the Caucasus or

Turkish Armenian relations.

 

The second guest speaker was Dr. Patrick Walsh, who gave a paper titled

"The events of 1915 in Eastern Anatolia in the context of Britain's

Great War on the Ottoman Empire". A self-styled Irish nationalist,

his paper was an occasion for his own vitriolic attacks against

Great Britain and Anglo-Saxons. His knowledge of the Ottoman Empire

was superficial, and his understanding of the Armenian Genocide was

schoolboy rendition of Turkish denialist paradigms from the 1980s.

 

The third speaker, Mr. Maxime Gauin, spoke about "Armenian Propaganda

Methods since 1972." This presentation was more sophisticated than

the previous one. Gauin argued that "terrorism" was part of the

political culture of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF),

the largest Armenian political party in the Diaspora. He stated that

such a terrorist culture manifested itself in the 1970s and 1980s,

when Armenian terrorists were responsible for dozens of attacks against

Turkish diplomats and other targets. Armenian terrorists, he stressed,

enjoyed widespread support and popularity amongst Diaspora Armenian

communities, as well as other circles. When such terrorists were

captured, he argued, they received lights sentences. Gauin did not

understand that "Armenian terrorism" was a fringe phenomenon, and

that Turkey's blanket denial of the Armenians Genocide, especially

in the 1970s, did much to give the terrorists a moral high ground.

 

Despite the purpose of the conference, which the chairman explained

was the improvement of Turkish Armenian relations, the actual

topics were irrelevant to current realities, and the speakers-with

one exception-were partisan in the extreme. While Swietochowski's

paper was interesting but unrelated to the Caucasus today, Mango's

was tiresome, Walsh's was absurd, while Gauin's was a more insidious

attempt to besmirch Armenians as terrorists.

 

http://www.gomidas.org/press/show/30